Sync Status Icons
You have three hundred notes in your vault and you want to know one thing: is my work safe in Notion, or is something stuck. Opening a dashboard to answer that is one step too many, and the honest answer is different for every note.
So N2O marks them where you already look. Every synced note and folder carries a small badge in the file explorer, the same way OneDrive and Dropbox mark theirs. Green and you can stop thinking about it. Anything else tells you what and whether you need to act.
Each mark has its own shape as well as its own colour, so they stay readable if you do not separate colours easily, and in any theme.
What each mark means
Section titled “What each mark means”| Mark | Name | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|---|
| In sync | Both sides match and everything in the page arrived | Nothing | |
| Incomplete | It is in Notion, but part of it did not arrive: an image that would not upload, a block N2O cannot carry | Open the N2O dashboard, it names what is missing | |
| Syncing | In flight right now | Nothing, wait | |
| Waiting | You have changes queued to go | Nothing, the next sync takes them | |
| Not sent yet | A note that has never been sent to Notion | Sync, or leave it if it is meant to stay local | |
| Needs you | Changed on both sides, N2O will not guess | Resolve it, see Conflict Resolution | |
| Failed | The last sync of this note failed | Open the N2O dashboard for the reason | |
| Paused | Its synced folder is paused, so nothing here syncs | Resume the folder when you want it moving again | |
| Skipped | You told N2O to skip this | Nothing, it is doing what you asked |
Incomplete and Failed look similar and are not the same thing, which is why they have different shapes and colours. Failed means the attempt did not work and the page is not in Notion. Incomplete means the page is in Notion and is not faithful to the original. They need different reactions, so they get different marks.
Folders show the most urgent thing inside them
Section titled “Folders show the most urgent thing inside them”A folder does not get its own state, it inherits. It shows whichever mark inside it most needs you, so a folder of forty synced notes with one conflict shows the conflict rather than a reassuring green tick.
The order, most urgent first:
- Failed and Needs you
- Syncing
- Incomplete
- Paused
- Waiting
- Not sent yet
- In sync
One note is enough to raise a folder for every state except Incomplete, which needs more than half the notes in the folder before the folder itself turns amber. Two incomplete pages out of a hundred and fifty is a sync that worked, and colouring the whole tree for it reads as “everything is broken”; most of a folder arriving incomplete is worth knowing about.
Two of those placements are deliberate and worth knowing.
Incomplete outranks Waiting because waiting is normal operation and incomplete is not. A page that arrived wrong is finished and still wrong, so it will never fix itself by waiting.
Paused sits below Failed, Needs you and Incomplete. Pausing explains why nothing is moving, so it correctly outranks the states it accounts for: a queued edit in a paused folder is not really “waiting to sync”, it is never going until you resume. But resuming does not fix a conflict or a failure, so those still show through. Otherwise pausing a folder would be a way to hide problems from yourself.
When you see nothing at all
Section titled “When you see nothing at all”No mark means N2O is not tracking that file. It is not in any synced folder, or it has no Notion page behind it. That is normal for the rest of your vault.